There's usually an equal amount of good and bad in everything. Choosing to do or use something has its own pros and cons.
In this case, it's choosing to reuse a shopping bag that may have its bad effects.
A new study found that grocery shoppers who use reusable shopping bags are more likely to purchase junk food. The difference was statistcally significant, researchers said. "When customers used a reusable bag, their chances of purchasing an indulgent item rose by more than 7 percent from 17.9 percent to 19.2 percent, adding at least $2 to their bill per trip."
While it has its own environmental benefits, bringing a reusable shopping bag to the grocery store may also lead to some questionable food choices.
Researchers from Duke University and Harvard Business School analyzed loyalty-card transactions at a supermarket to look at what shoppers buy when they bring their handy reusable bags with them, and when they don't. They published their findings in a paper called BYOB: How Bringing Your Own Shopping Bags Leads to Treating Yourself and the Environment in the online peer-reviewed Journal of Marketing from the American Marketing Association.
Looking at more than 100,000 transactions in a California supermarket, the researchers found that, while junk food purchases increased by 7 percent when shoppers brought their reuseable grocery bags with them, on the bright side, they found those same shoppers were 13 percent more likely to purchase organic products, with their organic, reusable bags.
"It was clear that shoppers who brought their own bags were more likely to replace nonorganic versions of goods like milk with organic versions," said Uma Karmarkar, business administration assistant professor at Harvard and co-author of the study. Karmarkar emphasized how one green act can lead to another.
However, the same people seem to use the green deed to justify buying junk food.
The researchers noticed that while organic products were purchased as a replacement of nonorganic ones, junk food was bought as an additional purchase. The shoppers were adding unnecessary, unhealthful items to their carts.
The study therefore saw this as a form of the shoppers rewarding themselves with junk food for doing the good deed of bringing a reusable shopping bag.
"It's the same thing as when someone says, 'I exercised this morning, I deserve a dessert at dinner'," explained Bryan Bollinger, marketing assistant professor at Duke, who worked with Karmarkar as co-author of the study. Karmarkar and Bollinger were able to break down the data to show that individual shoppers behaved differently when they brought reusable bags versus when they didn't. They found there's something about bringing a bag that actually changed people's habits.
In an interview, MarketWatch columnist Quentin Fotrell also speaks about the "licensing effect," a term used by psychologists to refer to when people give themselves the license to do "bad" stuff in exchange for something good.
Bollinger, however, points out that most of these shoppers don't really consciously justify buying junk food with the use of reusable shopping bags. But with studies like this, it is important to be aware of the effects of what we do - or buy - to our health.
